Death: Similarities & Differences - Research Paper

Natural Death

There are fundamental similarities and differences in natural death, accidental death, suicide, and homicide (Koehler, 2016). Natural death refers to a situation whereby the physical body stops to function on its own accord or due to existing medical factors such as terminal illness, heart disease, or any other body complication, which would cause death to occur naturally.

Homicide

Homicide refers to the act of a person taking another individual's life, whether intentionally or unintentionally. This can also be a pre-meditated murder, which is done by the victim having purposely planned and carried out the murder of another human being in a secret manner in cold blood. In this case, the murderer ensures that the authorities won't know that he is the one who executed the murder case by all means.

Accidental Death

Accidental death is when the death of a person is caused by other means other than a natural death, murder, or suicide. In other cases, accidental death can be manslaughter - a murder which is normally done out of an unintentional act of violence towards another. This kind of death can also occur when the victim dies out of involvement in taking risks, which automatically puts them in mortal danger. Deaths by misadventures are also categorized as an accidental death. This is, for instance, when sports participants die.

Suicide

Suicide, on the other hand, is the act of intentionally causing one's death. This deliberate act of taking one's own life can be as a result of mental disorders, bipolar disorder, personality disorders, severe depression, as well as substance abuse. Suicide is neither accidental nor is it classified as death by misadventure simply because the person has already come up with a specific plan of action, which would assist in ending their own life. These plans include crossing in front of a fast-moving vehicle, drug overdose, or cutting anywhere to cause uncontrollable bleeding hence leading to death. However, from the above different types of deaths, one thing is similar in that they all lead to having a lifeless body at the end.

Case Example

In the case of Thelma Todd, an actress who died mysteriously while in her car inside a garage, can be selected as a type of death falling under homicide. She was discovered sitting behind her steering wheel, and her death has been due to carbon monoxide poisoning. Previously, it was thought that she had either committed suicide or accidentally killed herself while warming up her car. Let's take a look at the key factors that police used to classify it. At crime scenes, there are mostly many opportunities to get evidence, and thus a broad variety of physical evidence is collected for investigation. The police first surveyed the area where the dead person was found at the scene of the crime and then collected the evidence (Koehler, 2016). However, the police took samples of bloodstains, fingerprints, body fluids, hair, palm prints, footwear, tire track evidence, cell phone records, email messages, tool marks, and drug evidence.

These investigations conducted afterward led the police to believe she had been murdered as blood spots were found in her car, and Thelma Todd's nose was also broken. One additional factor that the police should collect for the death investigation should be the use of the closed-circuit televisions footages on the streets and buildings around the murder area.

Comparison and Contrast

The fundamental differences in investigating a death case versus other types of crimes involved are that, in most of the death cases, there are no witnesses at all. This is because any death case, whether suicide, homicide, or accidental, mostly happens in circumstances where nobody else is around. As stated by Koehler (2016), death happens when the person is all alone and with no need for witnesses. Another fundamental difference in this kind of an investigation is that the victim cannot tell any information regarding who killed them, why did it happen, what caused it, where did it happen or how did it happen. Also, in most cases, it becomes very difficult to determine whether a certain death was either suicide, homicide, or accident. This is because there have been many cases where the people involved in the killing process end up staging a homicide death to look like a suicidal death, thus trying to disrupt the evidence.

The goal and the main procedure of a preliminary death investigation mainly undergo several stages (Geberth, Schimpff, & Senn, 2006). The first step is the examination phase. This involves inspecting the condition surrounding the death and what may have caused the death. This phase also includes obtaining all the available evidence. Since there are many opportunities to obtain evidence from a crime scene, the investigation by the investigators must be systematic and complete. The investigators gather evidence from the scene of the crime that might have been contaminated through touch by the suspect. They also take samples of bloodstains, fingerprints, body fluids, hair, palm prints, footwear and tire track evidence, fibres, dirt, dust, soil, vegetation, cell phone records, email messages, tool marks, DNA, human remains, firearms and drug evidence. Toxicology testing and x-rays are also done here. The crime scene is photographed, and videotapes are also taken, which will allow the investigators to refer back to them later as a reminder and as well as for either forgotten or any possible missed details. External body examination and documentation is also done. Internal inspection or autopsy is also carried out though it may not end up giving any true contributory information. The investigators usually ensure that careful measurements are taken, make comprehensive notes, as well as drawing sketches. All this collected evidence is gathered and carefully recorded.

The correlation stage comes in as the second stage. In this stage, all the information gathered by all the involved agencies during the examination process is brought together. Scientific and high technological advances are then employed to detect fingerprints, stains, hairs, fibres, and other trace evidence. In cases whereby the crime scene has been interfered with and cleaned as a way of concealing evidence, luminol is used in the process of detecting blood traces despite them even having gone a dilution of up to 10,000 times(Geberth, Schimpff, & Senn, 2006). The investigators who are specifically trained to analyze blood patterns then effectively determine the state in which the person was at the time of death, that is, whether walking, standing still, or even running. This assists in building a case fitting as much as possible together.

The last phase of the investigation involves a thorough interpretation. This, therefore, consists in developing the cause and manner of death, the case, and the underlying story supporting the conclusions that have been arrived at. The manner of death being a multiple-choice question is either natural or homicide, suicide, accident, or undetermined - an example of a successful preliminary death investigation in the case of Thelma Todd.

There are main ways in which various environmental factors may influence the medical examination and autopsy in the process of death investigations. For instance, rain could end up cleaning away any evidence that was at the crime scene; conditions of warm weather could lead to premature body decomposition, thus throwing off the exact time of death. In cases where the body is in the forest or an area with the flow of different animals, the animals could feed on the carcass, thus making the body identification impossible (Geberth, Schimpff, & Senn, 2006).

References

Geberth, V. J., Schimpff, J., & Senn, H. J. (2006). Practical Homicide Investigation: Tactics, Procedures, and Forensic Techniques. CRC Press. doi:10.1201/b14761

Koehler, S. (2016). Death Investigation. Forensic Epidemiology, 179-199. doi:10.1016/b978-0-12-404584-2.00007-0